Waksman Institute of Microbiology

The Waksman Institute of Microbiology is a research facility on the Busch Campus of Rutgers University.

It is named after Selman Waksman, a student and then faculty member at Rutgers who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1952 for research which led to the discovery of streptomycin.

He was selected by his peers after the untimely passing of the Institute's fourth director, Joachim Messing.

A total of eighteen antibiotics were isolated in Waksman's laboratory at the New Jersey Agriculture Experimental Station at Rutgers University.

Waksman used half of his personal royalties from patents for streptomycin to create the Foundation for Microbiology in 1951.